The first time Jasmine read this Pemi was 3 months old, with the 4 month sleep progression rapidly approaching. But she didn’t like it. She actually liked it so little that she just skimmed through it quickly in two days with a frown. It was just not her type of parenting book: too many pages were just dedicated to feel good statements (e.g. “you’re doing great”, “just do what works for you”), not enough with practical tips or insights or even descriptions of developing sleep patterns and common problems.

Then a months-long (yes, months plural) sleep regression hit us at 9 months. He went through all the buzz-word things babies can go through in a few months: growth spurts, teething, a virus roulette from day care, and many developmental milestones. He was learning to babble many new syllables, to crawl and to pull up to standing - all of which he of course had to practice in the middle of the night. He also was growing cognitively: learning about object permanence which meant he knew when we were gone, when we were leaving him at daycare or leaving him in his bed alone.

All this to say, his sleep suffered, and we suffered with it. Instead of being able to put him down in his crib drowsy and walking away as we had been doing for months, we had to cuddle him until he was completely asleep. He would wake up in the night and be awake for long (1 hour) stretches - sometimes crying for cuddles, sometimes just ready to play and babble. It was time to sleep-train again.

So we pulled out this book, and jumped to the one useful chapter where she outlines different methods of sleep training. We settled on the “Fade out method”, by far the most gentle method. Every night you offer a little less comfort until you reach the sleep comfort method you want (for us, self soothing and no pacifier). Say on night one we are holding him until he is deeply asleep. On night two we put him in his crib drowsy and then rock him in his crib until he is asleep. On night three we put him in his crib drowsy and don’t rock him. And so on. That is of course the picture-perfect timeline that doesn’t account for: overtired evenings, hand foot and mouth disease, travelling, etc. It’s a work in progress…